Forum Replies Created

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  • Sam Moulton

    January 24, 2008 at 1:49 am in reply to: water running down a window

    duplicate your footage layer. Apply Mr Mercury to the top layer. Adjust to taste. Experiment with blend modes and opacity

  • Sam Moulton

    January 22, 2008 at 7:21 am in reply to: need numbers to scrool up from 0 to 90 million

    Add a expression control point control to a blank text layer then copy and paste this expression into source text. Just set a keyframe for the Point Control and type the values in the first field. Here’s the expression:

    val = effect(“Point Control”)(“Point”)[0];
    numDec = 2; // digits to right of decimal
    numDigit = 9; // digits to left of decimal

    if (val < 0) sign = "-" else sign = ""; s = Math.abs(val).toFixed(numDec); while (s.length < numDigit + numDec + 1) s = "0" + s; sign + s; if (numDec > 0){
    decimals = s.substr(-(numDec + 1));
    s = s.substr(0,s.length – (numDec + 1));
    }
    outStr = s.substr(-s.length, (s.length-1)%3 +1);
    for (i = Math.floor((s.length-1)/3); i > 0; i–){
    outStr += “,” + s.substr(-i*3,3);}

  • Sam Moulton

    January 12, 2008 at 9:21 pm in reply to: A Simple Motion Problem?

    I get accurate results. Pal square pixel comp, square pixel solid, starting position at 1 second is 100, 288. Set keytframe, then moved to 4 seconds and set position keyframe at 1000, 288.

    layer moves 900 pixels in x in 3 seconds or 300 pixels per second.

    Checking position at 2 seconds it’s exactly 200, 288.

    Change the comp to non square pixels and the results are the same.

    If you’ve got any easing applied or your keyframes don’t look like ◊ in the timeline then you won’t get exact numbers.

    If you motion isn’t just in x or just in y then you won’t get exact numbers either. If your movement must be exactly 300 pixels per second try adding this expression to the position.

    x = position[1] + (time * 300);
    y = position[0];
    [x, y]

    this moves 300 pixels per second from left to right. Want to move from right to left then change the + to a minus. Want to move up or down, change the y to x and the x to y, then change the zero to one and the one to zero.

    hope this helps….

  • Sam Moulton

    January 9, 2008 at 6:27 am in reply to: How to change text like the Decoder Fade In?

    use two text layers and fade between the two. The first goes to the random letters, the second goes from random to words. That seems easiest to me since the number of letters differs.

  • Sam Moulton

    January 2, 2008 at 12:03 am in reply to: multiple emmiters for particular

    You have to use multiple layers with a different emitter for each instance

  • Sam Moulton

    December 31, 2007 at 4:44 pm in reply to: Traveling Down a Road in AE
  • Sam Moulton

    December 31, 2007 at 12:24 pm in reply to: Fields – do I understand correctly?

    If you move or scale interlaced video in the comp you must separate fields. Moving interlaced footage up or down an odd number of pixels will reverse the field order and really screw things up if you don’t separate fields.

    Any time you use a camera and place interlaced video in a 3D layer that’s not perfectly square with the camera and at the default distance you must separate fields.

    About the only time you can not separate fields and be guaranteed that you’re not loosing quality and risking all kinds of output problems is if you just drop the video into the new comp icon or into your empty comp window or timeline to create a new comp with exactly the same properties, and then you don’t touch any of the transform options other than opacity. OTT, you should always separate fields.

    If you want to see every field, you double the frame rate of the comp.

    When you render you can choose to introduce fields or you can choose not to introduce fields. This is an artistic decision and has no other effect except for how the rendered product will look. Interlaced video for the web generally looks terrible. Interlaced video for TV generally has a smoother feel to motion. Non interlaced video for TV means that the set will still display fields but both will be the same moment in time so the results will have similar motion characteristics as film. They won’t be exactly the same, but they will be similar because of the different way the shutter works in film cameras vs video camera.

    There are even differences in the way motion looks between film cameras. Most motion picture cameras have rotary shutters that have the shaft to the right side of the frame and they rotate counter clockwise exposing the film from the bottom of the frame to the top, but others have the shaft below the frame exposing the film from left to right. These two types of shutters produce different motion artifacts just as a video camera, which scans the frame from top to bottom every other line, then goes back and picks up the missing lines twice per frame and 60 times per second (50 pal) in the standard way produces different motion artifacts than a video camera that’s truly progressive and records the entire image for each frame. When shooting, especially panning, you have to take great care not to introduce a stroboscopic effect with both film cameras and progressive video cameras. When creating moving elements for non interlaced or progressive output you have to be very careful that you don’t end up with the same problem. Whether or not to separate fields is a much easier question to answer than whether or not to render interlaced for TV. Move, scale or rotate, separate. Render with fields, depends the motion in the frame and on how you want it to look on TV.

  • Sam Moulton

    December 26, 2007 at 4:16 am in reply to: Educational v. Professional Version

    Why not just go to the source.

    https://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb402371&sliceId=1

    Turns out you can upgrade educational versions, just not at the educational price. IOW, buy educational version of CS3 then when CS4 comes out, you can upgrade to CS4 for the same price anyone that owns CS3.

    Some software is missing some of the extras, but as far as I know AECS3 educational and full retail are the same in features and plug-ins.

  • Sam Moulton

    December 24, 2007 at 10:51 am in reply to: Creating a sun orbiting a planet

    don’t know if this will help but the last time I checked planets rotated around suns.

    I’d set up the layers in 3D space with auto orient to camera turned on. Parent the planet and sun layers to a null at the center of the sun, then use a star field background thats several times wider than the comp as a 2D background that’s animated by either using the offset effect or by simply animating the x position to make create the parallax effect of moving stars.

  • Sam Moulton

    December 24, 2007 at 10:25 am in reply to: making lines out of dots/points.

    try scaling in x about 1000%

    your jpgs don’t have an alpha because jpeg doesn’t support alpha channels.

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